Monday, 9 March 2009

For this post, I decided to tell you a little bit more about my N.A.N.Y. 2009 entry.

As I said on donationcoder.com , I started writing this application because I needed to create a document at work, just like the one that this application generates.
For the past year, I was working on a large project , and at one point – I needed to provide a complet list of all tables and constraints for several users in DB that we created...
I, maybe, could use some existing application to do this, but I wanted to make it myself
;-) . Specially when half of work was already done, because I used queries provided by Olivera at www.insidedev.blogspot.com

To start the application, run “RUN MGTD.bat” and a login window will appear.

enter all parameters and click “connect”.

New window, containing all user tables will appear.

Here , we can decide which tables we want to process. We can do that by applying certain filter , or just by excluding some tables.

Next thing we need to do is to set some things. We do this in “settings” tab.
Here we can select what kind of constraints we want to generate information for.

Also, we can select which colors to use when generating document.

I’ll use default colors, except for table containing colums of current table.
I’ll use yellow for it.

And, before we start generating a document, we need to define a location for our document …
I’ll use c:\MGTD

When you’re ready – press Execute.

And when progress bar reaches 100%, you will have your document created…

Every table is described ( what columns it contains , what data type ( ans size of it) , nullable? information and a comment ) and there is also a list of all constraints for that table ( Primary keys, Checks, Foreign keys and Unique keys ).

As you can see, table containing info about columns names and type are in yellow, like we wanted it to be…

Now when we have html document, we can easily create a .doc or .pdf …

Not many people will find it usefull, but for those who need something like it, it's more than helpfull, and I hope they'll like it...